75bear

I can't figure out why there are no Norwegian Airlines flights offered in April 2017 between Oakland, CA (OAK) and London - Gatwick (LGW). Norwegian is offering flights between these 2 cities for the 6 months prior to April 2017 and the 6 months following April 2017.

So why are there no flights between these cities in April 2017??? I tried calling and chatting with Norwegian Air as well as Oakland airport and nobody has any information.

Anyone have any idea what's going on? Glitch in the system? Airport construction? Something else?

75bear

I'm going to respond to my own post.

While I still haven't figured out why Norwegian doesn't offer April 2017 flights between OAK-LGW, it appears that British Airways just announced OAK-LGW service starting the end of March 2017. So there's now competition on this route - which is a good thing!

Maybe Norwegian will step up and fill in the missing April 2017 OAK-LGW flights now to take on BA (I know - wishful thinking).

irishguy28

The winter timetable ends on Saturday 25 March; the summer timetable commences on Sunday 26 March.

This means that most routes will see some sort of re-jig at this time [winter seasonal destinations - such as LAS, SJU - are dropped]. While it is a little unusual that the LGW-OAK route doesn't recommence in the summer timetable until 5 or 6 weeks in, it is not the only route showing a reduction for the first weeks of the summer timetable - LGW-LAX also drops during the same timeframe, but from 5 weekly to 4 weekly service.

The airframes thus freed up are either deployed elsewhere during this time, or are necessitated for other reasons.

andrew3000

The summer 2017 flights for Norwegian are now showing on their website.

They have been late in publishing their Oakland timetable before. Maybe it's a negotiation tactic with the airport or something.

David-A

As a general answer, I'd say late timetables are often far more likely to be due to airframe availability uncertainty. As late time tables can happen even on routes with long term commitment.
If an operator is looking at other routes, these may dictate when frames would be available to schedule other routes. Also, if maintenance windows, I've seen operators late publish schedules, despite always having the intention to serve the route one way or another, purely because the route in question could cope with the late annoucment.
etc, etc.

Basically, I'd put practicalities ahead of negotiation in most cases. And I also would never assume a late schedule annoucement implies any operator uncertainty, I've seen it far too many times for other unrelated reasons when the operator has known they would operate one way/time or another.

But I'd don't know norewegian.

BigFlyer

The April flights are showing now.

I'm not sure that BA flying from Oakland is a good thing - it is really not about competition, but more likely a predatory attempt to get Norwegian to discontinue the route.

irishguy28

Competition is always a good thing.

Besides - itäs unlikely that Norwegian are going to drop ALL routes from OAK just because of a single BA route (I would also say it is unlikely that they would drop even that one route).

Or maybe it will encourage them to seek space at SFO...

rnsn

I second this, particularly since the new BA flight is going directly into LGW rather than LHR.

Though if I'm not mistaken OAK-LGW is the only US-London route flown by Norwegian that has no competition from BA (BA flying to LGW or LHR)